---
title: "Artifacts"
date: "2024-06-21"
summary: "A new Sonnet builds a working interface beside the chat — and leaves me circling the real problem: we keep regenerating software that already exists"
tags: ["ai","building","claude","reuse"]
---

Yesterday a new Sonnet landed, and with it something Anthropic calls Artifacts. You ask for an interface, and a working version of it grows in a panel next to the conversation. Not a snippet to paste somewhere. A thing that runs.

I typed a description of a small pricing calculator — fields, a slider, a running total — the way I'd brief a junior at the studio over coffee. A few seconds later it was sitting there, live, clickable. I moved the slider and the number moved. I changed my mind about the layout and it rebuilt, calmly, while I watched.

There's a particular quiet that comes over me when a tool stops being a tool and starts being a collaborator. I felt it.

But here is the thought I can't put down. I built that calculator. So did a thousand other people yesterday, each describing roughly the same fields, the same slider, the same total. Every one of us got a fresh, slightly different version, conjured from scratch. The machine is brilliant at making the thing. It has no memory that the thing already exists.

I've shipped enough software since 1999 to know how much of it is the same software, written again. The login. The uploader. The little form with a total at the bottom. We rebuild the wheel because rebuilding is cheaper than finding and trusting someone else's wheel.

Now we have a partner that can rebuild any of it on command, instantly, infinitely. Which makes the waste faster, not smaller.

Generating is solved. The next question is whether any of it can be trusted enough to reuse instead of remake. I don't have the answer yet. But I've started to feel the shape of one.